


Hard Roads, Curious People III

by Thimblerig



Series: The Lion and the Serpent [37]
Category: The Musketeers (2014)
Genre: Dialogue Heavy, Gen, Road Trips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-26
Updated: 2017-06-26
Packaged: 2018-11-19 07:07:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,048
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11308284
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thimblerig/pseuds/Thimblerig
Summary: In which there is a sunny afternoon.





	Hard Roads, Curious People III

**Author's Note:**

> I don't even know if this is good, anymore. But I'm going to have a cup of tea and a cookie now.
> 
> CW: Brief mention of miscarriage; a joke about violence I probably wouldn't go for in a modern story.

The _grisette_ whistled him off the road not far out of Paris. Aramis twitched the reins and let d’Artagnan’s warhorse, Zad, slow to a walk between the poles of the little two-wheeled cart and halt by a verge of tall green grass and gently waving stalks of flowering yarrow. He hopped down and bowed briefly with his hand over his heart. “Can I help you, Mademoiselle?” he inquired politely.

She walked up, smiling, a mop of auburn hair lit up by a scrap of autumn sun become a flare of colour against a grey serge dress and hands chapped and red from recent work. “It’s Madame, actually,” she said cheerfully. “I have an errand down the road, and my horse foundered. Since you’re going in that direction, perhaps…?” Zad lipped at her short curly hair in a friendly manner and she stroked his cheek. Aramis’ tiny yellow horse slipped her leading rein and walked up, shouldering the larger horse aside with disdain to lean her forehead into the _grisette’s_ chest. She blinked, staggered against the weight, then stroked little Jezebel’s mane too.

“It seems the horses have decided the matter,” said Aramis, smiling, and handed her up to the wooden seat. She leaned against the high wooden back and sighed, shutting her eyes and lifting her face to the sun as the tumbril started to move.

“Let me know when you need to turn off,” he said, and she flapped a hand in agreement.

He peeked at her as they drove. The woman did not quite… add up. Her roughened hands matched her coarse dress, it was true, but the garment hung awkwardly on her frame, a looseness not in keeping with her neatly crossed ankles and folded hands. She did not hold herself like a _grisette._ Aramis ticked through the possibilities - borrowed clothes for an assignation, recent fall from grace, on the run from the authorities…

At the third fork he said, “Left here, too?” She smiled in agreement, then, her pretty eyebrows crumpled at a droning noise that had just begun. “Is that a hive of bees you're transporting?”

“Ahaha, complicated story there, well you see -”

She leaned over the backboard and flipped aside a striped cloth propped up on sticks to reveal a lanky, beautiful young man sprawled recumbent on bales of fragrant tobacco, snoring gently.

“He is sleeping off a headache,” Aramis promised, “that’s all.”

“That is quite a shiner,” the _grisette_ said, touching a bruise on d’Artagnan’s cheek lightly and smiling thoughtfully as he turned into the palm of her hand while sleeping. “What happened?”

“There… may have been a quarrel over a passage of St Augustine?”

“Truly?”

“Well...”

“He probably deserved it,” she said calmly. “He has a rakish, villainous look to him.” She rubbed her thumb against the corner of D’Artagnan’s mouth and he smiled in his sleep.

“He didn’t,” said Aramis regretfully. “Not really. But I needed to keep him out of a loyalty conflict and he’s stubborn. The rewards of virtue are not always kind.”

“That sounds like a story,” she said, sitting back up and sliding the loose reins out of his hands. Her voice was naggingly, damnably familiar.

“I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours?” he asked, smiling lightly and making it nearly a joke.

“Three weeks in hell,” she said promptly, raising eyes as magnificent as Athos’, “but my bit in it is over for now and it’s a sunny afternoon, so I’m going to enjoy that and not fret about beautiful young men being hauled around like a sack of produce.”

“At least it isn’t… skirret.”

“An inferior vegetable,” she agreed. “You couldn’t tell the difference between that and parsnip before, Aramis.”

“So we do know each other,” he said softly.

“It’s good to see you.” She eyed him quizzically. “You may call me Constance, if you’ve forgotten; I’m this one’s wife.”

He disengaged one of her hands from the reins and lifted it, kissing the knuckles formally. “It is a delight to meet you. Again.”

She giggled.

Then Aramis’ face fell. “Three weeks in hell? Were - were you caught in the quarantine? I am so sorry; they didn’t tell me. If I hadn’t -”

“Not everything is about _you,”_ she said sharply.

His breath caught in his throat.

“Constance,” he asked with caution. “Could you say that again please?”

Her eyebrows furrowed. “It’s not about you…?”

“Did… please excuse me if I am wrong,” he said in a breathless rush, looking away to the road, “but did we ever, perhaps, share quarters in an… establishment of an incarceratory nature?”

He felt her hand move to clasp his wrist. “You remember that?”

“I -” He shook his head irritably. “It’s like beads from a broken string, sometimes. Little gems to hold onto and a great bare space in between. I remember you were very brave. I considered you a friend. And it was my fault you were waiting to be kil…”

“Aramis, _look at me.”_

He turned and she dropped the reins and put her work-chafed hands to the sides of his face, then laced her fingers into his hair. “I remember I said I’d break your -”

“- pretty nose if I didn’t stop apologising and then I -”

“- apologised for being a tedious conversationalist so instead we talked about antique Court gossip, and my little mite I couldn’t bring to term - I never spoke to anyone about that, not even Bonacieux at the time - and, Christ, how painful it was to love someone inappropriate and yet…” She trailed off. He was watching her almost hungrily. “After all that you remember _me?”_

“Are you not precious?” he asked, eyes flicking over her face as if to memorise it. _“Don’t be afraid; never give up hope,_ that’s something the voice in the dark told me -”

“Ha!” she said, a little hysterically, “I heard that from d’Artagnan half an hour before -”

“Oh dear, he’ll be unspeakably smug when he wakes up.” His voice cracked. “And you _lived.”_

“I did.” Her mouth quirked. “Aramis, hold still.” His eyebrows asked a question. “I'm going to hug you now.”

She rested her chin on his bony shoulder and felt him tremble. Or maybe it was her, after what she could only count a stressful handful of weeks.

“Sometimes we get people back.”

**Author's Note:**

> You didn’t _really_ think I was going to kill off Constance, did you? Also, after the doomy nature of the last two stories, I thought a breather was in order.
> 
> // _grisette_ as in ‘young working woman’, not the mushroom or the beer. Apparently named after the grey serged wool dresses they commonly wore.
> 
> // _“I heard that from d’Artagnan half an hour before -”_ \- It is a terrible thing to watch episodes of the show while trying to write - I kept getting distracted by the pretty, and the casually virtuoso camera work, and the AAAAAH!, and Porthos’ voice when he’s riding off on an Extra Dangerous Mission and taking time to inform d’Artagnan that Constance is going to be just fine there ain’t no other way things can happen, and… stuff. But I also got a good canon line to quote so there’s that.


End file.
